The Glittering Globular Cluster Terzan 12 — A Vast, Tightly Bound Collection Of Stars — Fills The

NGC 7635, Bubble Nebula

M31 Adromeda Galaxy (Visible Light) by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

L1527 IRS - Protostar

Stars form when bodies of dust and gas create enough mass to create a gravitational effect that's able to then pull in more gas, the process continues and the mass increases until the pressure at the centre is sufficient for fusion to begin.

There's many examples of protostars, in fact back in 2012,  NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope focused in on L1527 IRS, believed at the time to be the youngest forming star ever found.

Recently, the JWST re-visited this protostar, and the title image was the result.

The forming star cannot be visually spotted, but is thought to be around 20-40% the mass of our own Sun already.

If you look closely, you can see there's a dark patch in the centre, this is actually the accretion disk around the newly formed star, what is left over after the formation, may go on to form the planets, in fact, they may be actually starting to be created already, as recent evidence does point to planets being born around the same time as the star does in many cases.

The protostar is only 450 light years from Earth in the Constellation of Taurus, and is thought to be around 100,000 years old, a blink of an eye in the life of a star, particularly of this mass.

The photos that NASAHubble & NASAWebb took of The Pillars of Creation inspired me deeply. I had to draw what I saw in the formation: A hand reaching into the universe. What an accomplishment for humankind and what a symbol for exploration and knowledge. Credit 2nd image: NASA

A beginner’s star-book, an easy guide to the stars and to the astronomical uses of the opera-glass, the field-glass and the telescope, 1912

The Ghosts of Gamma Cas ©

Star clusters shine in the universe l Hubble

NGC 1365, Heart of the Universe

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

Earth, which is about 898 million miles (1.44 billion kilometers) away in this image, captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft 🚀